In February, a blog suggested the trend for top US newspaper websites was one of decline. The picture gets fuzzier now that the March numbers are in on “time spent per visitor” on newspaper websites. Some call this the “stickiness” factor. It’s another way of measuring web traffic besides the number of visitors (”unique audience”). It’s not necessarily quality versus quantity, but that’s one way to think about the difference between the two metrics.
You’d think with all the presidential hoopla, especially the furious competition between the two Democratic hopefuls, that national newspaper outlets providing blanket coverage would do well on this measure. And some did. The Politico almost tripled the average time spent per visitor in March compared to a year earlier.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal also gained, but The Washington Post, USA Today and Los Angeles Times lost ground. Can’t say if it’s related to coverage of the presidential race or not, but it’s one theory. Keep in mind that The Politico has a dedicated core of news junkies, whereas the readers of the other sites are more heterogeneous in interests.
Among the major metro papers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Houston Chronicle saw the biggest gains in time per visitor. Most major metros saw declines in time spent, including a huge drop for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Editor & Publisher published the March 2008 and March 2007 data from Nielsen NetRatings. I’ve culled the figures for the biggest gainers and losers. Time spent is noted in hours:minutes:seconds. First column of figures is for March 2008, second is March 2007.
| Gainers | ||
| The Politico | 0:15:11 | 0:05:52 |
| Houston Chronicle | 0:28:41 | 0:19:48 |
| Seattle Post-Intelligencer | 0:11:18 | 0:06:07 |
| Wall Street Journal | 0:14:49 | 0:11:18 |
| New York Times | 0:37:14 | 0:33:48 |
| Losers | ||
| Atlanta Journal Constitution | 0:11:23 | 0:28:45 |
| USA Today | 0:11:26 | 0:17:50 |
| Boston Globe | 0:11:40 | 0:16:23 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 0:10:13 | 0:14:41 |
| Chicago Tribune | 0:07:16 | 0:11:06 |
Data for The Seattle Times wasn’t included in the E&P report. I’ve sent an email to the journal to find out why. The San Jose Mercury News was left off the top newspaper websites list in the February data, so this seems to have something to do with a cut-off for making the top 30 by some metric.
But the overall decrease in time spent at newspaper websites is part of a broader trend in declining time spent at web portals in general as RSS and other widgets allow users to pull content to them. In other words, the whole damn iceberg is breaking up.
